The July 3 Oceanic Esports Highlights

The esports never stops, and we've got stacks of great stuff coming at you this week! League of Legends, Rocket League, Counter-Strike and PUBG all put on a great showing — let's have a look now!

Be sure to head over and check out the rest of the esports hub! Remember you can email tips to me esportsau@ign.com or you can just click to send me an email. If you want, you can tweet suggestions at me as well, my twitter is down the bottom of this article.

League of Legends - OPL 2018 Split 2 Week 4

Split 2 of the OPL this year is like the humour in Everybody Loves Raymond — anybody can get it. I've been saying it for a while, but it's the most competitive the OPL has been in a long time — while Avant and Legacy might be languishing near the bottom of the table for now, that could change in an instant. Take the Chiefs, for example — until last week, they were in full control. They hadn't changed up their roster, they were in form — everything was looking good.

This week though, they face off with the giant killers — Tectonic — who a few weeks ago slayed Melbourne superteam ORDER. And like ORDER, the Chiefs got shook by Tectonic. Game one between TTC and CHF really demonstrated how evenly matched the teams are this season — in the clip below, Tectonic are finished… until they wipe Chiefs and the entire game gets turned on its head. It's one of those things — a brief moment of overconfidence from the Chiefs that Tectonic seized on and used to their advantage.

CSGO - IEM Shanghai Oceanic Qualifiers

The Counter-Strike continues to hammer along, with heaps of competitions happening at any one time. IEM Shanghai is coming up though, and IEM Sydney's Aussie Upstarts Grayhound wound up earning the only spot at the game. The other two local teams who represented at IEM Sydney — Chiefs and ORDER — both stood in their way, but both fell to the dog pound. Watch GG's captain Dexter nail a clean ace below against ORDER.

There have been some… oddities with the way the PGI Qualifiers have been run — no consistent ruleset, teams knocked out thanks to meta-gaming shenanigans, some restarts here and there due to server crashes — but I don't think anyone could contest the absolute clinic the Chiefs ESC team put on in the Oceanic Qualifiers.

They looked straight up savage throughout the qualifiers, and when it came to bringing that heat to LAN they were just as brutal. It's sort of garbage that we can only send one team over — especially after we dominated at ZIMO — but if it's gonna be just one team, I'm glad it's the Chiefs. Watch P_for_Potato slay ORDER in a late game shove below.

Rocket League - Gfinity AU Week 5

The Gfinity AU Elite Series continues, as teams repping cities around Australia duke it out. The Rocket League was especially spicy this week as the Chiefs took on Order. The Chiefs team is the same one that went to the RLCS Worlds, and ORDER have a team comprised of the former DarkSided roster. It was an ultra close matchup, going all the way to game five in the best of five series. Eventually the Chiefs won — the amount of pressure they put on the entire series was just too much for ORDER to bear. Still, it was an epic effort from Melbourne's team — Sydney wins again though, I guess that's why we're the Australian Capital of Esports.

Before we wrap up, Aussie Organisation DarkSided released some rosters and I thought the video from CEO Matt West was well done. He explains quite clearly why DarkSided parted ways with its Hearthstone, Counter-Strike and Rocket League teams. There's a lot of insight in there and it's elocuted well. It might be a bit 'inside baseball' though, so fair warning — highlight reel this is not.

Hit us up in the comments or on twitter if you think I missed any of the best highlights!

Joab Gilroy is an Australian-based freelancer that specialises in competitive online games and chicken dinner acquisition. You can tweet at him here.